There are a lot of people in rural America with long distance, high towing capacity needs that won't be able to use EVs (or afford a new vehicle at all) for a long time.
Rural people in Texas won't be buying electric trucks in 5 years. Maybe 10, but I doubt it. Until the electric equivalent of a fast charging gas station comes online in every small town, I doubt we'll see mass adoption in rural areas.
My relatives in rural Texas can easily drive 100+ miles a day just to go to work and the store/errands. If they needed to take a trailer that day, they would likely reach the limit of electric range.
My guess, wealthier rural families will probably get the ball rolling by purchasing electric cars for commuting and keeping the big diesel truck for weekend toy hauling/livestock/etc. This will incentivize some infrastructure in rural communities until city adoption reaches peak levels and we start to see infrastructure spread out from cities to support road trips and road warrior business commuting.
I want to own an EV, but every time I look into it, it's just not worth it yet.
* I live in rural America. I do a lot of local driving, but when I don't, it's often 200+ miles and a good amount of that is 500+ miles. Many parts of that route do not have charger infrastructure. I'd have to buy/rent an additional car for these hauls.
* Towing range. I tow a small trailer occasionally. All vehicles reduce their range with towing, but it's even harder in an EV when the infrastructure isn't in place.
Meh, range of today's EVs is more than enough to support suburban and rural people. Remote rural areas with 100 mile drives to the store exist but are hardly the commoners.
As I've said I don't know how many times before in these threads: This doesn't take into account, not even rural areas, but areas that are simply not metropolitan cities. The idea of vehicles-on-demand out here where I live, where I still commute between farmers fields, is utterly laughable. Who on Earth is going to buy them and operate them? And where is everyone going to warrant the service?
More to the point, when you're doing things with your vehicles that don't involve just moving from A to B with a laptop case, the idea of sharing vehicles gets a little more complicated. A good 4/5 of my friends have done some kind of modification to their cars, not adding spoilers or that nonsense, but changing how they work to do a job better than they did before. Add to it other tasks like towing equipment, pulling other vehicles loose from mud, plowing snow, on and on and this idea that no-emissions EV's are going to replace all of this is frankly stupid and shows once again the disconnect between a whole LOT of the US alone and I'd imagine elsewhere and the cities.
I'm not saying gas is forever, it is obviously going away and you'd be stupid to say otherwise. But to say that because Tesla and Chevrolet has made an admittedly perfectly good and arguably attractive alternative to the compact runabout used by a lot of city dwellers who hate driving anyway means that all gas powered cars are going away is fucking absurd. The only EV I know of capable of towing ANYTHING is the Tesla Model X, and even then it's towing capabilities have gotten extremely mixed reviews, ranging from complaints about the range absolutely plummeting when anything of substance is being moved, to the vehicle not handling the strain on the rear axle well.
I know I'm in the minority here on HN not living in a huge city with infrastructure aplenty who's ready to bail on cars forever, but seriously, there is so much ground to cover yet for EVs.
Right, this reads like classic "what's wrong with Kansas" type analysis. There's lots of potential reasons that EVs might not make sense for people in rural environments. Serviceability, range, towing capability, and maybe most importantly just expense. Up until the last year or three Tesla was close to the only option, and even though the new offerings aren't universally as expensive as a Tesla, you're still looking at new car prices, which are substantial.
Looks like the cheapest Bolt is 27k, which works out to something like $4-500 monthly payment.
Wouldn't fit into my budget, and we make about twice the median income. Not hard to imagine many, many people making a similar financial call
When I lived in Alaska, there were villages that were hundreds of miles apart. Enough so that you had to bring extra gas with you in addition to your full tank. Until EVs can handle that range while keeping you warm at the same time, they're not going to work. For those people. And running out of charge could be deadly in -50 deg where there's little chance of people coming by to rescue you.
Unless we want to have the government build of recharge stations in the middle of nowhere, those people will be entirely left behind.
Perhaps in 5 years we'll be there. I hope so! But pretending those people don't exist won't make them disappear (I'm not suggesting that is what you are doing for the record, I'm speaking generally).
EV's are great for big cities, but about half of US pop lives in rural areas. Outside major highways EV chargers don't exist in the sticks.
In rural places 50 mile trips are normal. It's not unusual to drive 90 miles each way in a day. And chances are you won't find an EV charger on either end.
And in rural areas you have single phase electric, slowing down charges. And in the same places, power goes out for days at a time most years.
If you think the US is ready to go EV-only you live in an urban bubble. In much of the US, EV's are still wildly impractical.
In the country you may need to go 500 miles with no electricity when power is out for a week. Only a fool would buy an EV in sparse areas where long outages happen (most of rural US)
I don't think EVs make sense for a lot of rural use. Slow charging, and they need a lot more torque. The Ford electric truck makes a lot of sense, but they can't be rolled out quickly enough.
They would be great for moving around workers for harvest and some limited pickup, but there's a reason pick-ups are the most common vehicle in rural area.
It's very common in non-urban areas of US West such as around huge National Forests to have very limited infrastructure. And it's not 0.00001% of the population that goes to places like that.
I suspect that there will be some substantial subset of users and use cases where PHEVs will make sense for a very long time.
Rural doesn't imply the individual owns land. Rural does imply long distances, modest incomes, etc. I certainly wouldn't want to charge an electric vehicle @ $0.14/KWH and I don't have the option for solar.
I have a Toyota Tacoma. I expect it will go well into the multi-hundred miles (typical for Tacomas), I have 4 jerry cans filled for when exploring off-road or for times like "oh hey, the power is out, the pump in a rural town doesn't have power".
The Tesla truck, the only model that made sense of you do any back country/rural driving was the three engine 550mi (if I remember right) version. Even then, I would think a generator would need to be carried (and fuel).
Rural areas don’t have chargers for the most part. That said, I’ve seen some chargers along 395 in rural NV that surprised me.
Until range becomes less of a concern, I’m not getting rid of my Tacoma.
I (author of the comment you mention) personally need a 4WD dinosaur burner that will start after being left parked in the snow for a week away from where there's any sort of cell service. But I know that puts me in the minority and I also know don't need that all the time.
I don't see the "shared asset" model working at all. Not clear if it even works at the moment -- Uber's business is mostly cream-skimming the wealthiest users. But a self driving fleet can serve most rural communities as well (at the expense of a lower utilization rate than in urban areas). A car sitting in a driveway most of the time is a very expensive luxury. Most rural communities are less wealthy than most urban areas. A set of self-driving vehicles near by is a lot cheaper than a lot of idle cars.
Electric, and pay-by-the-ride are not panaceas. It's an 80/20 breakdown. I have, at one point, lived a ninety minute drive from the nearest town. I don't see how electric can handle what is really an edge case. I also don't understand the economics of electric utes (pickup trucks).
Not a good fit for lifestyle. I'm rural, and I haul around ATVs and dirt bikes with the main destination being 300km away and even more rural. My pickup truck is a way better choice for that.
I used to tow a utility trailer with a small gas car. It worked fine, but this is just so much easier and more luxury. I don't believe any EV could handle this use case.
Certainly affordable wouldn't work for rural because range is really needed. However, it's doable now with 300+ range EVs (assuming there's a city within 100/150 miles of your location).
One thing that would change this quickly is if V2H ends up taking off. Then you can ditch your backup generator and use your EV in the event of a power outage. For very rural places or off grid places that could be really valuable.
80% of the US lives in urbanized areas and a good chunk of the remaining 20% live in relatively close proximity to urbanized areas. Rural areas in the east and Great Lakes are mostly not far from metros.
People like your parents are edge cases, although even their daily medical trip is just about feasible with an EV today. The number of people living in very rural West Texas or southwest are relatively small (and the mountain west is rapidly urbanizing unfortunately).
EVs don't have to meet every use case just like an ICE diesel pickup truck or a steel crusier bicycle wouldn't fit everyone's transportation needs today.
But they definitely can already meet the majority of Americans driving patterns today.
No choice? In rural environments, where you have to drive an hour to a small city and 3+ hours to a large city, and there are no local businesses, no one is going to be operating self driving cars for hire. Electric cars aren't currently practical in such places either, though over time that will likely change as battery and charging tech improves—but I don't see shared ownership or commodity car usage replacing ownership rurally at any point, and there will always be people living rurally. If new cars stop becoming available at a reasonable price to buy, then people will continue repairing, rebuilding and using old cars.
I think that the technical limitations of EVs (range, towing, etc.) are things that will not be overcome. I don't want to say it will be easy, but it will be a matter of a motivated company (or companies) applying resources to to solve a problem.
The far more wishful thinking part of the article is the idea of a retreat from ownership and on-demand vehicle usage. I'm sure it will be an option. Avis and Hertz will build fleets of summonable cars that you pay in a monthly fee and it picks you up and drops you off. That sounds great as a city dweller, but there are lots of parts of the country where that simply isn't tenable. I know of hundreds of towns in my state that have a population of less than 500 and are at least a hour drive from a town with more than 5000 people. No car company can fix that problem, and even if they create a great incentive to move to cities, that would be a glacial process, and that kind of migration would only make the idea less tenable for people that choose not to move to cities.
As you mention there is all the people that modify their vehicles, but even simpler--how many people with young children have a car seat semi-permanantly installed in their back seat?
And the other point I never see brought up when you see these pie-in-the-sky predictions--there were 254 million motor vehicles registered in the US in 2012. (1) There were 17.55 million light vehicle sales in 2016 (2). Obviously some of the 254 million are vehicles that would not get replaced in a migration to electric/autonomous, and some people would likely migrate to an on-demand model, but it certainly suggests that a complete cut-over in 8 years time would be very difficult especially for people living in poverty who today might be driving a 20 year old vehicle that they paid $1000 for, and can't afford a new vehicle, and may have reasons that an on-demand model wouldn't work for them (rural poor for example.)
They should be buying EVs for those who needs them such as rural area. For the rest of us, our quality of life would improve if we get rid of cars and densify areas.
Fun story: I live in very rural Oregon and a few years ago a friend bought an all electric for use around town. He had to bring it to town with a truck and trailer because it didn’t have near enough range to get here on its own. Works out great for him though.
The additional charging coverage contemplated by the article would have let him drive it home.
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